OK, I got one of those GoTek drives, the 720kB one, from China. It was cheap on eBay, I can provide a link if anyone is interested.

I format the USB key using the ipcas software that everyone says you should use. I tell it I want 100x 720Kb floppies, and it appears to make them. Note that I understand at this point, those are theoretically PC format floppies.

I take the key to the QL, where I've plugged the GoTek drive into my Trump card, and it is operating as FLP1_

I use a 'FORMAT FLP1_TEST' command and it comes back after a short while saying 714/720 sectors. I sort-of expected to see 1434/1440 or whatever the figure with true 720Kb floppies tends to be.

So I try to copy from a very full floppy over to the GoTek, thinking maybe the sector 'size' is different on this beast, and it complains 'disk full' with about half of the data copied. This is reproducible with different 'floppies' within the GoTek and I even tried a different USB key.

In all other respects it seems to work fine - I can save files to it, I can press the button and 'change' to another floppy, I can save files, I can flip between 2 floppies using RAM1_ as a temporary holding space etc, everything survives a reset etc etc.... all is good apart from the fact that the Gotek floppies appear to be half the expected size.

Anyone advise me that I'm missing a step, or doing something stupid? I haven't had a chance to format the USB key as a series of 1.44Mb floppies and then tell the QL to format a given 'floppy', but I assumed that because I needed to get the 720kB drive, I would be telling their tool to make me 720Kb floppies too.

If FLP_TRACK 80 fails and the lines above work then that leaves two possibilities: (1) derive a QL 720K image by other means and copy as required, or (2) replicate the Trump card format routine less the track 55 check.

A Gotek with HxC firmware loaded. I also managed to get hold of some converted QL games in HFE format and it works.

The next stage is to buy a copy of Q-emulator (order page is down at the moment!) to have a go at creating some more HFE games images myself, although from memory I believe someone said at some point that the BOOT files on some games (which I notice open in Notepad) may need to be edited to work as floppy disks\with the gotek\as HFE images.